Survival games often put the player into difficult, dangerous environments meant to push them to the wire. So the planet Arrakis, the primary setting of both Frank Herbert’s Dune and the upcoming survival game Dune: Awakening, makes for a pretty imposing survival challenge.
Sandworms, storms, and harsh rays are the first of many challenges for anyone daring to carve out a living amid the spice dunes. Funcom, the developer behind Dune: Awakening, has already dabbled in licensed survival games with Conan Exiles, but the dangers of Dune are something a little bit beyond your typical natural dangers and environments.
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We sat down with Senior Art Director Gavin Whelan and Associate Art Director David Levy to talk about creating the world of Arrakis for Awakening, and it was pretty clear that capturing Arrakis in all its terror and glory was front-of-mind.
“The main character is always going to be, for me, the planet,” said Whelan. “The planet is the big thing that’s going to kill you. It has the worm, it has, you know, the sandstorms, the weather, the sunlight. These things are inherently dangerous.”
Whelan told me the team got to collaborate with Legendary, visiting the sets and seeing the constructs made for film adaptations of Dune. There was always a back-and-forth though, in portraying the typical hallmarks of Arrakis and making it all work for a game. A constant fall-back for Whelan and the team, as he said, was “keep it subtle but make it stand out.”
“This intense world, in which surviving is not an easy thing,” said Levy. “So that’s something that visually drove a lot of the look of it, for the atmosphere.”
“It’s like, it’s beautiful though,” said Whelan. “The sun comes up and you go ;oh, that’s nice.’ And now I’m burning.”
Making Player-made Buildings Fit in Dune: Awakening
An interesting challenge in how Funcom approaches Dune: Awakening is through its player building, which allows survivors on Arrakis to build their own bases and shelters. Obviously, this means a builder is free to craft something that feels thematically appropriate, or you know, whatever they want to make. Whelan says players have made everything from their own sandworms to the likes of giant scorpions. At some point, you have to put the tools out there and let go.
“You’ve got variety, and I think that’s what I was really hoping for,” said Whelan. “Does it really fit within the Dune universe? Giant scorpion, probably not, no, but that’s the thing. When you hand the game over to players, they take it, they make it their own. They have fun with it. They sculpt the universe in their image.”
Still, Funcom is trying to keep Dune: Awakening honest to the aesthetics of Dune. Whelan describes his teams and artists as material masters, architects, and people who have worked with real-life equivalents. The challenges are a bit different from Conan Exiles, though.
“We learned that from Conan Exiles, that people do really interesting things,” said Whelan. “With Conan Exiles, we were working with themes that were very accessible. Medieval stuff, Roman stuff, you know. Roman, Greek, and Viking-type buildings. It was very easy to pull from references. Here we have brutalist architecture, and how many different ways can we do that?”
Here is where Whelan and the team leaned on their expertise to create that sort-of “subtle but stands out” vision for Arrakis.
“They understood the belief very quickly, that we can’t just give them a block of concrete and put it in the desert and say, this is done, it’s fixed, it’s finished,” said Whelan. “It’s going to look half-done, it’s going to look like a placeholder piece of work. So there’s a lot of subtlety in there, but there’s also a lot of expression, and we had to be able to have a building set at the fundamental base level, that allowed the player to be expressive with it.”
The Beauty and Power of Arrakis
Capturing the power of Arrakis is also pretty difficult. In a movie theater, the sensation of being overwhelmed by the vast sandworms, dense storms, and chaotic conflicts can be appealing to a passive audience. But for an active player in a survival situation, that can be a little hectic.
“Everything on this game was technically hard, and we just had good people working on it,” said Whelan. “Or poor VFX artists, suffering, with all the sandstorms and things, all on screen, all at the same time.”
Because of the alt-timeline Dune: Awakening takes place in, where the Fremen have seemingly disappeared and the War of Assassins rages on, Funcom gets to tinker a bit with the looks of traditional factions. The Atreides, for instance, aren’t quite as clean-cut as they used to be. But everything needs to maintain a recognizable shape; “We can’t do Warhammer 40K and massive shoulder pads, we can’t change the silhouette of a person too easily,” said Whelan.
Still, the visual language of both the movies and books gave Funcom a lot to work with, when it came to capturing the world of Arrakis.
“So it’s using the movie visually as a base, in terms of lighting, and expanding that vision into something that’s much more complex, with different biomes,” said Levy. “Not only biomes, but also in those biomes, you have variation every day. That you have different weather, that you have storms.”
The longer we talked, the clearer it became that Whelan, Levy, and the Funcom team wanted to capture both the danger and beauty of Dune. What surprised me, though, are the thoughts about development that came from making Dune: Awakening. Making a Dune video game is no small feat, after all. There are challenges and expectations associated with Dune, a series with quite a notable history in video games.
“There was fear, and joy, and the challenge,” said Whelan. “I mean, we didn’t go into this because it was easy. Game development is hard, intrinsically hard. Go down onto the floor and anybody who’s worked on game development will just go, I pull my hair out over this thing, this thing kills me. But I do it because I love it, because it’s a challenge, not because it’s easy.”
Read our impressions from the Dune: Awakening Beta here.
For Whelan, as senior art director, he says he got the joy of seeing juniors grow into “superstars” over the course of making Dune: Awakening. But going to PAX East, the team got a little helpful perspective too. After working so close to a game for so long, after all, you can lose the forest for the trees.
“Especially as an artist, you know, you tend to forget why we’re welding everyday into endless bug fixing,” said Levy. “And coming here and seeing players just laughing or screaming or saying ‘wow,’ you know, at the end, it just puts everything back into perspective.
“That moment, I mean, I really want to drink it in,” Levy continued. “Because there’s such a sense of pride.”
It’s a sentiment that stuck with me, seeing so many developers and studios on the floor of PAX East. There’s a lot of work that goes into everything shown on the show floor, and I’d like to think everyone had their own moment on the floor, reflecting on all the work that led to that moment. One other quote stuck with me too, though, as Whelan discussed what it means to work with a team.
“When I first joined the games industry back in 1995, somebody gave me a speech, ‘you are only limited by your imagination,'” said Whelan. “He lied. So much. There are so many limitations out there. But talented people overcome those. They try to achieve something that, hopefully, the players will appreciate and enjoy.”
